Is arena football still a thing?
I don't know if it's currently being played -- I think not -- but the patented rebounding screen has long since passed into the public domain. I went to a couple of games at the Felt Forum of MSG.
But as to Florentine Calcio, I've figured a little more about it after watching another match. It seems that after a tackle -- which may require pinning the ball under the player -- the referee creates a 50-50 ball, so teams are very careful about possession. This match was a very close one, with the team that won the opening jump ball keeping it for a long time, and then when they lost it, their opponents quickly took a shot, which closely missed over the net. The resulting half point (demi-cacha) for the opposition looked like it pretty much decided things, with the team that was ahead pressing their advantage and winning by a lopsided score.
The forwards (18 of the 27 players each side, though I don't know if that 18 is fixed by rule or just an optimal number by experience) punch, kick, and grapple with each other attempting to get their opponent down. When you're on top of an opponent who's down, that means you have a head start getting up and joining play to be part of a scoring rush or to defend against one. So all the bashing, battering, and standing off in the middle is just to produce this slight advantage and a broken field. Meanwhile the backs circulate with the ball in the backfield, moving left and right, looking for numbers to their advantage. They dare not move forward prematurely because of the danger of losing the ball and the risk in taking a long shot. It looks like a basketball or lacrosse freeze. However, the opposition (which has to start in their own end at the jump ball) usually doesn't send defenders forward to challenge them, because that would weaken their defense.
Usually an attack begins along one side wall after several feints, but then proceeds in a broken field run thru all the wrestling and boxing players, sometimes leading to a pass to a player who breaks free and catches it on the run into a close scoring position. The scoring itself it usually anticlimactic, just chest-passing ball over the end wall into the net from close range.
This is the most similar game I've ever seen to American and Canadian football. In some ways Rugby League football has more in common with them, but Florentine calcio is the only type of football I've seen that has anything like the blocking used in American and Canadian football. It's an example of convergent evolution, inasmuch as Florentine calcio has next to no common descent with them. Observers of other types of football frequently remark about American football's slow pace, but Florentine calcio slows it down in the extreme. You couldn't force action advantageously with a defensive rush, because with no offside rule (other than having to separate at those infrequent jump balls), everyone eligible to receive forward passes, and no limit on the number of forward passes, it should be obvious how you'd be leaving an opening if you left the opponent you were fighting with alone. So you don't have anything like the closely timed interference of American or Canadian football, but rather struggle with mixed martial arts against an opponent to try to establish lasting dominance.
